News

Despite the extreme importance of transaction processing for ensuring reliability and manageability of distributed computing and several existing WS-* standards, the implementation of the transactional behavior in SOA is still pretty rare. The Reservation pattern, described in a new post by Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz, provides one of the possible solutions to this problem.

IBM, Oracle, Red Hat and others have just announced the formation of the Web Services Test Forum, a venue for continuous testing of interoperability for heterogeneous Web Services implementations as well as a flexible way for vendors and customers to define the interoperability scenarios that are important for them. But how does this relate to WS-I and why has Microsoft not signed up to it yet?

In this presentation, recorded at QCon London 2008, Mark Little explains the history of SOAP/WSDL/WS-*-based web services and RESTful HTTP and shows that both approaches have their roles to play in any good architect's toolkit. He elaborates on where possible convergence could, or should, occur within the industry.

In this interview, recorded at QCon London 2008, Red Hat Director of Standards and Technical Development Manager for the SOA platform Mark Little talks about extended transaction models, the history of transaction standardization, their role for web services and loosely coupled systems, and the possibility of an end to the Web services vs. REST debate.

In this interview, Stefan Tilkov talks to Sanjiva Weerawarana about web services and REST, about core standards that are essential for web services standards, open source SOA tooling, scripting languages and web services, and the strategy of WSO2 in providing open source middleware.

In a new InfoQ minibook, InfoQ SOA Editor and SOA Enterprise Architect Jean-Jacques Dubray describes the state of the art and emerging new approaches in building "Composite Software", solutions created by assembling existing services. The book is available as an InfoQ Minibook, i.e. free of charge in PDF format for InfoQ users. A printed version is available too.

This question prompted a heated debate on MSDN in the wake of the release of the first web service transaction standard last May. Juval Löwy from IDesign, Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz and others exchange their arguments as they answer the question.

The OASIS WS-TX technical committee held a face-to-face meeting last week at IBM Hursely. This is likely the last such meeting prior to final standardisation of WS-Coordination, WS-AtomicTransaction and WS-BusinessActivity.

Sun Microsystems has launched the open source initiative called Project Tango. Windows Communications Foundation Engineers are working together with Java Web Services Engineers on the interoperability of enterprise features.